It was a rainy night in November and at the Bronx Zoo a crowd of hundreds of thousands braved the elements to hold a candlelit vigil for Tabby, who was about to die.

Tabby’s zookeeper held the noble cat’s paw as the heartbeat monitor next to the cage went “woop woop” in a weak, melancholic cadence.

“Tabby, you sweet thing”, said the zookeeper. “Do you know how much you mean to all these people?”

Tigers had been extinct in the wild for so long, and all of the tigers in the zoo had gotten tired of making love. It was really sad. Tabby the tiger’s parents had been so horny, though. They were the horniest tigers ever. When Tabby was born, the hope was he would also be incredibly, incredibly horny. But he was not as horny as his parents, and he never had sex. He would die a virgin, despite throngs of people – over a billion visitors over the years—praying for him to have sex. The Pope had once held a special mass for Tabby where he got millions of Catholics to say “Please Lord, make Tabby frisky” in unison in a service broadcast all over the world. To no avail.

When Tabby was born he was one of five remaining tigers, including his father. His mother tragically died during childbirth, and his father was so distraught that he never fucked again. Of the three remaining tigers, only one of them was a girl. Her name was Mewy, and unfortunately she was not very horny. Mewy and Tabby shared the same cage for years, and despite the world’s foremost scientists dedicating decades of their lives to finding a way to getting them to fuck—despite there being a new genre of popular music invented where the whole point is to get these two tigers into a relaxed, horny state of mind, and this genre became huge—all of the major artists released multiple albums in the hope that it would make a difference… despite the mass prayer sessions which actually united Israel and Palestine for a couple of decades because people thought this was more important than historical differences… despite the budget the size of the GDP of Sweden spent constructing high-tech, fancy cages and also trying to clone tigers or at least make some kind of fertilizing aphrodisiac and that aphrodisiac actually did work—for humans, at least—and now impotency in humans is at least cured, but still no luck on the god damn tigers. Despite all this, and so much more, Tabby never fucked Mewy because neither of them could be bothered.

When Mewy died a few years later, and Bongo died a couple years after her, Tabby was the last tiger in the world.